Chinese Companies Return to Cannes – But Will They Bring Their Checkbooks?

May 2017 – Media Mention

The Wrap MagazineQuoted | Sky Moore

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A flat Chinese box office and investment restrictions could loom over Cannes, but the sale of rights to individual movies may not be affected much.

Tinseltown has a long tradition of extracting healthy sums of money from flashy foreign financiers who can’t stay away from the world’s most glamorous industry. Most recently, much of that cash has come from China. But after a two-year run in which seemingly every major and minor studio inked a coproduction deal with Chinese financial partners and Chinese companies agreed to a series of increasingly eye-popping acquisitions, including Dalian Wanda Group’s $3.5 billion purchase of Legendary Entertainment in 2016, the firehose of Middle Kingdom funding abruptly dried up.